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Tuesday, 9 June 2009

India: Savagery of the Police, Touches Upon the New Heights

Woman Dies, Child Injured, After Being Thrown Out of the Running Train by the Police

-by our correspondent

Lucknow/ 20 June 2009. In what can be termed, a completely outrageous and predatory incident, a pregnant woman, alongwith her daughter, has been thrown out of the running train by the armed constables of the Railway Police, near Lakhimpur Khiri, 180 kilometres from Lucknow.

Kavita, who had boarded the second class compartment of the Malini-Gonda passenger train, at Lakhimpur, with her husband Dinesh and her daughter, was run over by the train and had died on the spot, while her daughter sustained serious injuries.

The immediate reported cause was a dispute between the husband of the victim and the constables who were forcing him to pay a bribe of Rs 100 ($2) for carrying the bicycle with him in the train. Kavita is reported to have offered them Rs.10, upon which the angry constables threw both Kavita and her daughter from the running train before the eyes of other passengers.

The matter is though not that simple as it seems. It has become almost a customary practice in the second class compartments of the long route trains, which are routinely boarded by poor people, mostly migrant labourers and peasants, going to or coming from their native places to their work places. Huge sums are recovered from the poor passengers on one or the other false pretexts, either by the policemen themselves or through the local gangs under the patronage of police. Manhandling and physical beating of those who refuse to pay the money is normal affair, during the course of this recovery. The recovery is made between long distance halts, so that the passengers remain helpless before armed policemen or the goons. Police ensures that no complaint of any such incident is recorded, though many of them are made by the passengers. This booty of the loot is then shared from bottom to the top, from constable to the Minister, through a direct and indirect system of bribes. Auction of plum postings at every level, is one of such channel in this system. The loot thus goes with impunity, as everybody in the state machine is the beneficiary of the same. The system thus remains totally insensitive and oblivious to the woes of poor people.

The command of the machine of law for its execution on the ground is lastly handed over to the constabulary, which is systematically trained and calibrated by the pro-rich state to salute and respect the elite and the powerful, while to deal the poor with utmost contempt and savagery. These armed forces which protect the rich and their property so skilfully and zealously, hardly have any respect for the life or dignity of the poor, whom they crush under their boots.

It is not the individual constables, who are alone guilty for the ghastly crime apparently committed by them, but the pro-rich capitalist system, which does not recognise the poor even as human beings. In the name of maintenance of law and order, the armed forces are maintained by the capitalist state as a blind force to protect the property of the rich and the system of loot of the poor and working people, through thousand of ways.